Tragedy in Iraq.

Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three
children in their car

By Justin Huggler in Baghdad

The abd al-Kerim family didn’t have a chance.

American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at
close quarters.

They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only
eight years old.

Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to
tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed
for the Americans to stop.

“We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us,” the
heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said.

“We were calling out to them ‘Stop, stop, we are a family’, but they
kept on shooting.”

The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were
killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush
declared the war in Iraq was over.

In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address:

“Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people … All Americans
can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have
achieved in Iraq.”

But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day
at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.

Doctors said the father and his two daughters would have survived if
they had received treatment quicker.

Instead, they were left to bleed to death because the Americans
refused to allow anyone to take them to hospital.

It happened at 9.30 at night, an hour after sunset, but long before
the start of the curfew at 11pm.

The Americans had set up roadblocks in the Tunisia quarter of Baghdad,
where the abd al-Kerims live.

The family pulled up to the roadblock sensibly, slowly and carefully,
so as not to alarm the Americans.

But then pandemonium broke out.

American soldiers were shooting in every direction.

They just turned on the abd al-Kerims’ car and sprayed it with
bullets.

You can see the holes in the front passenger window and in the rear
window.

You can see the blood of the dead all over the grey, imitation velvet
seat covers.

A terrible misunderstanding took place.

The Americans thought they were under attack from Iraqi resistance
forces, according to several Iraqi witnesses.

These are the circumstances of most killings of Iraqi civilians: a US
patrol comes under rocket-propelled grenade attack and the soldiers
panic and fire randomly.

This time there was no attack.

Another car, driven by an Iraqi youth, Sa’ad al-Azawi, drove too fast
up to another checkpoint further up the street.

Al-Azawi and his two passengers did not hear an order to stop, as
their stereo was turned up too loud.

The US soldiers, thinking they were under attack, panicked and opened
fire.

In the darkness of one of Baghdad’s frequent power cuts, other US
soldiers on the street heard gunfire and thought they were under
attack.

They, too, reacted by opening fire, though they could not see what was
going on.

Soldiers manning look-out posts on a nearby building joined in, firing
down the street in the dark.

It was then that the abd al-Kerims drew up to the checkpoint.

The panicking US soldiers turned on their car and shot the family to
pieces.

“It was anarchy,” said Ali al-Issawi, who lives on the street and
witnessed the whole thing.

“The Americans were firing at each other.”

There was plenty of evidence lying in the street under the hot sun.

Empty bullet casings lay everywhere.

Bullet holes marked the walls and gates of nearby houses.

Several parked cars were riddled with bullet-holes, their windows
smashed and tyres shredded.

From the spread of the bullet holes all over the street, it was clear
the soldiers had fired in every direction.

Sa’ad al-Azawi, the driver of the other car, was killed.

The Americans dragged his two passengers out and beat them, still
thinking they were resistance, Mr al-Issawi said.

Watching from his house nearby, Mr al-Issawi did not know that
al-Azawi was dead, and when the car burst into flames, he tried to
rush over to help the young man.

“The Americans did not let me,” he said.

“A soldier came over and told me ‘Inside’. He pushed me, even though
my eight-year-old daughter was with me. They didn’t let us get the
young guy’s body out of the car until he looked like he had been
cooked.”

Further down the street, Anwar abd al-Kerim, who was heavily pregnant
and had somehow managed to escape injury in the car as bullets rained
all around her, got out of the car, holding her wounded eight-year-old
daughter Mervet, and sought help from her brother, who lived down the
road.

She had to leave in the car her injured daughters, 16-year-old Ia and
13-year-old Haded, along with her husband, Adel, who was bleeding
badly and groaning.

I put them in my car and tried to drive to the car but the American
soldiers pointed their guns at me and the people shouted out to me
‘Stop! Stop! They will shoot!’

“We could see the other girls and their brother lying on the back seat
of the car. They would not let us go to the hospital.”

Ia was not as badly injured as the others.

“After a while they released her and let her come to us,” Mr Jawad
said.

“But when they finally let us go to the hospital, Mervet died.

The doctors checked her injuries and told us she would have lived if
we had brought her sooner.

“At 10.45 we heard the Americans had taken Adel and his other girl to
another hospital. We went there at six the next morning, when the
curfew was lifted, and they told us they both died in the hospital.

“The doctors said they might have lived if they got there sooner: the
main cause of death was bleeding. The Americans left them to bleed in
the street for hours.”